Instagram users don’t view these short films, and most Reels users have no engagement: Reports
Instagram has recently begun to resemble TikTok in appearance; however, despite this radical makeover and a new emphasis on short-form video, TikTok’s astronomical audience figures have not been replicated on Instagram. On Monday, it was revealed that a copy of an internal study document that had been issued in August and was given the title “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022” had been viewed by The Wall Street Journal. According to the findings of the study, Instagram users do not spend a significant amount of time watching these short movies, and to make matters even more concerning, “most Reels users have absolutely no engagement.”
Customers spend less than 17.6 million hours per day viewing reels, according to The Journals.[Citation needed] [Citation needed] The amount of time that users of TikTok spend watching short-form videos each month is 197.8 million hours, which is 10 times greater than the amount of time that users spend watching short-form videos on Meta’s apps. It is also speculated that the company is at least largely accountable for the dearth of content producers and influencers who use Reels. Only 2.3 million of the 11 million Instagram users in the United States who have been recognized as producers publish content on a monthly basis, according to records kept by Instagram that were cited by the Journal.
The poll also found that a third of the reels still had the watermark from the original websites they were generated on, most notably TikTok. This was particularly surprising given the nature of the content. In spite of this, the platform has only paid Reels creators a total of $120 million so far, which is a significant drop in the bucket compared to the total payouts they anticipate making by the end of this year, which are estimated to total $1 billion. However, this estimate may not take into account payments made to content creators on Facebook.
In response to a request for comment made by Gizmodo, a spokeswoman for Meta responded with the following: “This report gives an incorrect view of our progress on Reels by relying on outmoded and, in some cases, inaccurate information. Although there is still more work to be done, content producers as well as businesses are seeing good results, and the number of individuals using Reels is at an all-time high. As a direct consequence of this, the rate at which we increase our revenue is far higher than we had planned.
The Chief Operating Officer of Instagram, Justin Osofsky, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that despite the fact that the company was seeing “great promise in the deployment of reels,” there was still work to be done. According to Osofsky, more than half of the material that is contained in private communications is contained on reels. Over the course of the past two months, Meta has squeezed Reels into both Facebook and Instagram, and the rollout has not been entirely smooth. The efforts of the social networking sites to imitate TikTok weren’t completely well received by all of the platform’s users. One viral ad and the meme that went along with it both complained about changes to the platform. It was shared by millions of people, and even celebrities like Kylie Jenner reposted it.